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Arminta Wallace, The Irish Times

“I felt that I had been very far away, in some land where the customs were strange – in Persia, I thought…” – The Sisters

I’m standing in the middle of Dublin, just north of the Liffey, at the corner of Parnell Street and Cumberland Street. The place is humming with cars, buses and people. Many – most – of the faces are African or Chinese. It’s already a potent mix of worlds. But as I prepare to cross the road I’m transported to a different world. Flickering all around me, in this other universe, are the sounds of James Joyce’s Dublin, from church bells to Victorian parlour songs. And inside my head are the rhythms and cadences of Joyce’s Dubliners.

The characters – Old Cotter, Ignatius Gallaher, Eveline Hill, Father Flynn and Gabriel Conroy – are speaking to me as if I’d just met them in one of the city’s many hostelries. It’s not so much that they have come out of the book as that I have strayed into it, courtesy of one of Wonderland Productions’ self-guided Dubliners walking tours.

“He pursued his reverie so ardently that he passed his street and had to turn back…” – A Little Cloud

Wandering around 21st-century Dublin, lost in Joyce, is a mildly perilous undertaking. The tour begins at the James Joyce Centre, on North Great George’s Street, where the staff kit you out with an MP3 player, headphones and a series of maps and charts. The player switches itself off regularly to save battery power, but it bookmarks the place, and restarts at the same point, so that isn’t a problem. The maps are crammed with visual information.

Perhaps wandering, Leopold Bloom-style, is a necessary part of the experience. And when you’re listening to beautifully written, beautifully performed stories through headphones, it’s easy to get lost.

“North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free…” – Araby

There are several of these tours to choose from, depending on how much time you have. The route on the half-day tour takes you north from the Joyce centre past Belvedere College and Hardwicke Street, then up to the King’s Inns. Then it’s back along Capel Street and Mary Street to the river and Usher’s Island for the house of The Dead.

You track back via Temple Bar, Duke Street and Nassau Street. It takes about four hours, allowing pauses for coffee, lunch, standing and staring, sitting and dreaming. The commentary presents nuggets of information, tailored to the pace of your perambulation. Layers of history peel away from buildings as you pass.

The upper storey of Penneys on Mary Street fades to the Volta cinema, the scene of Joyce’s brief venture into the movie business. O’Neill’s pub on Suffolk Street becomes Corless’ restaurant. “Clifden oysters, wines from the wood and a first-class French chef.” And here is Joyce having tea with William Butler Yeats on Kildare Street. Yeats is 37, Joyce 20. “I’m sorry,” the younger writer remarks over his shoulder as he leaves, “but you’re too old for me to help you.”

“Da,” says the young man of Slavic extraction sitting next to me in a cafe on Mary Street as he and his friend tuck into two full Irish breakfasts. The sun blazes through the glass. The sunny side of the street. Joyce is meticulous about such things. You could check the forensic accuracy of his descriptive writing, if you were so inclined. Or you could just soak it up with the sunshine.

“Like distant music these words that he had written years before were borne towards him from the past…” – The Dead

The reading of The Dead is, unsurprisingly, the climax of the day. The story that almost didn’t make it into the collection has become a literary superstar.

But the overwhelming impression left by this tour is one of pulsating life. It’s a joyous celebration not just of Joyce but of parts of Dublin that many natives, never mind tourists, rarely see.

Like all good tours, it makes you look at your city with different eyes. Walking back down O’Connell Street to the James Joyce Centre, I pause at Middle Abbey Street while a Luas glides past. And then I do a double take. Cycling along behind the tram on an ancient sit-up-and-beg bike is a little auld lad straight out of Dubliners central casting.

I blink. Did I dream him? Is it some kind of visual Wonderland trick? No: there he is, pedalling merrily across O’Connell Street the wrong way, in the wake of the shiny new tram. Disappearing eastwards into the future. Joyce would love it.

Eithne Shortall, The Sunday Times

Lest anyone forget that the Irish capital belongs to James Joyce, Wonderland Productions has developed an audio performance of Dubliners, the author’s short story collection, that also acts as a city tour. Participants listen to adaptations of the tales on MP3 players (supplied) and follow the accompanying maps around Dublin.

The stories are performed well, with particularly enjoyable contributions from Barry Mc Govern and Shona Weymes, but it is not necessary to hear them on location. It is the additional, site-specific trivia that makes the trip worthwhile. The tour passes the National Library, where Joyce and WB Yeats met for tea in 1902, and wanders down Nassau Street where the author first gazed on Nora Barnacle, his future wife. The sign for Finn’s Hotel, where she worked, is still visible. An accomplished adaptation of The Dead is best enjoyed whilst wandering around the house on Usher’s Island where it is set. The eight hour tour is for a more fanatical Joycean than I, but picking your favourite bits from the half-day version is a treat for any fan. Bring a bike.

Kate O’Connor, QualityWaffle.ie

Joyce said of Ulysses, ‘I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book’, however the same could be said of his collection of short stories Dubliners.

A collection of 15 beautifully constructed short stories; Dubliners dips gently into the lives of a host of characters living in Dublin city around the beginning of the twentieth century. Even though Joyce wrote most of his work whilst living outside of Ireland, Dublin is perhaps one of his biggest and most influential characters in his work. Which is why it is a mecca for lovers of Joyce’s work, who come every year to explore the city that inspired one of the world’s greatest writers.

All this has led theatre producer Alice Coughlan [sic] to down her theatre tools and assemble quite a large cast of inspirationally-voiced actors, whom she recorded reading various selections of text from a number of different stories in Dubliners. What results is a tiny little mp3 player, which holds some beautiful recordings of these fabulous stories. However, Wonderland Productions’ Dubliners Walking Experience is not just about the recordings, it involves a map and the city of Dublin also. Slipping on your headphones and heading out onto these historical streets, you are immersed deep into each story.

To really make the experience effective, Coughlan has reworded and restructured some of the work to include more dialogue in each story, so that the characters can tell their stories more than the narratorial voice originally in the story. Two Gallants in particular is very striking, walking down Rutland Square (known to today’s Dubliner as Parnell Square East), we earwig on Lenehan and Corley discussing the generosity Corley has managed to receive from a certain lady friend.

The highlight for me was The Dead – the most striking story in the collection, it has its home in Usher’s Island and also The Gresham. While The Gresham piece wasn’t as poignant as it could have been due to the ridiculous amount of Dublin buses crawling by, the house on Usher’s Island was particularly special. Entering the house, you sit and listen to Lily the Caretaker being literally rushed off her feet and Gabriel making his entrance, peeling off his galoshes. Climbing up the stairs, we enter the drawing room and hear the wonderful music and conversation. We find the dining room is set for dinner and take our place at the table to listen to the dinner conversation. Arriving back downstairs, we gaze up the stairs as The Lass of Aughrim floats through the air – if there was anything that ironically could bring The Dead to life, it was this moment.

Various other stories are mapped out, with stops scattered across the city – the Church on Meath Street, Temple Bar, Ely Place, St. Stephen’s Green – they’re all packed in there in a half day tour that took us near on five hours to complete. There’s a full day tour available also which takes you out to Chapelizod as well as the city centre. The tour was extremely impressive, not just by how well the extracts have been delicately reworked in parts, and carefully recorded, but also by how well they bring the stories to life when listened to on site. It may perhaps be a bit too long for someone who isn’t entirely head over heels in love with Joyce, perhaps a shortened version taking about two hours long would be a more attractive activity, but for anyone who loves Joyce and would like to experience his work being really and truly brought to life, then it’s a must.
Sara Keating, The Sunday Business Post

From the distance of his various homes in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, James Joyce recreated a map of his home city through his fiction. In Ulysses and Finnegans Wake his tribute to Dublin is an expressionistic one, reimagining the geography of the city’s streets through the subconscious mind. In Dubliners, however, his affection for Dublin is more easily accessible, in a series of short-stories that provide intimate encounters with the city’s inhabitants in the early twentieth century.

Wonderland Productions has married Joyce’s work with its topographical spirit in James Joyce’s Dubliners, an audio-tour that combines geographical detail with dramatised versions of the stories, the tour begins when participants are given a MP3 player and a slim plastic envelope containing maps and instructions. There are a variety of options available for the participant: a two and an half hour mini tour, a half day tour, and a full day tour. The tour can be condensed by taking a bicycle rather than walking and there are suggestions for refreshment stops, some of which can even be integrated into the storytelling, which is of course the focus of this audio-theatrical production.

Adapted and directed by Alice Coghlan, Joyce’s stories are presented as first-person narrations or dialogic scenes. Where audio versions of short stories are often read by a single reader, here the use of different voices helps enormously in creating the intimacy of evoked atmospheres. The Sisters, for example, is narrated by a child, and the authorial voice disappears so that the story can become pure character…

The walking tour, meanwhile, remembers the writer’s school days at Belvedere College, Finn’s Hotel where his future wife Nora Barnacle worked and his aunts’ house on Usher’s Island where the central story of Dubliners, The Dead, is set. A tourist will undoubtedly experience these sites differently from a native, but there are surprises even for those who know Joyce’s city centre haunts well. The nature of an audio tour is that it guides your vision. I have never noticed the gates at Kings Inn, though I lived close by when I was in college. I had never seen the grotto behind St Catherine’s on Meath Street, though my father was christened there.

Dubliners: An Audio Tour is a terrific idea, well executed, and one that might easily be replicated to provide dramatised access to the life and writings of other Irish writers. However, it is difficult to think of a writer whose work would suit the format more than Joyce.

Entertainment.ie

2012 is a monumental year for fans of the iconic Irish writer James Joyce, not to mention the arts world as a whole. There is something about Joyce’s work, specifically the much-loved Dubliners, that lends itself to the stage, and thus there are many in the theatre world who find themselves in a tizzy of excitement with the news that this year his work finally comes out of copyright and is open to interpretation, re-working and of course dramatization. Wonderland’s Alice Coghlan is one such person, and with her company’s audio walking tour of Dublin, has intentions to revive the Dublin in which Joyce’s characters walked, lived, loved and lost in his 1914 collection of short stories, Dubliners.

In the year that Dubliners has been chosen as Dublin City Library’s “One City, One Book”, Wonderland gives you the opportunity to follow the footsteps of Joyce’s eclectic host of characters while listening to their voices and stories acted out by a sizeable cast via mp3 players. Whether you are a Joyce fanatic, someone whose head has been turned by the hype surrounding his work in this significant year, or, perish the thought, feel ill at the sight of Ulysses perched pretentiously on any self-respecting scholar’s coffee table, walking the streets of Joyce’s Dublin has a transporting effect that stays with you long after the Mp3 and giant earphones have been returned.

That’s not to say this is a perfectly devised piece. While one appreciates the value in retracing the steps of the people who populated Dubliners and the Dublin of 1914, there is something mildly disconcerting about being instructed to walk around in circles in some less than savoury areas of the city. Although the juxtaposition of Dublin then and now is undisputedly interesting, there was something about the ginormous earphones and maps that seemed to yell “Rob me, rob me” as we walked Parnell St and Hardwicke street, the locations of The Boarding House. It takes the first couple of stories to abandon any trepidation and lose oneself in the voices and sounds of Dublin 100 years ago, but by the time we had arrived at Henrietta Street for the recitation of A Little Cloud it was easy to do so and enjoy the experience immensely.

The Dubliners walking tour is a wonderfully conceived idea, and although there are some small problems concerning the ease of navigation (both with the map and the mp3 player) there are a handful of moments throughout the course of the adventure which overshadow them. The recreation of the dinner party in The Dead is atmospherically executed – the candlelit dining room table conjuring up images of dancing, quarrels and, of course, the heart-breaking unrequited love that lies at the heart of this story. Another stand out moment was a stop off at Farrington’s in Temple Bar, a pub which features in Counterparts and retains its charm from that time, even if the barman did seem confused and slightly afraid when, as instructed in the programme, we quizzed him on the pub’s literary connections.

This walking tour will bring you to corners of Dublin that do not feature highly on the tourist trail and is all the better for it. As soon as you get into your stride and immerse yourself in the interwoven stories of the Dubliners of long ago, it becomes almost a thrill to walk in the path of these curious characters and, of course, the man who gave them life. I can’t think of a much better way to celebrate this monumental year for James Joyce, or indeed to spend a sunny Saturday in our fair city.”

Dave Madden, DublinCulture.ie

It’s a self guided audiotour; the participant dons a pair of headphone with an attached iPod, and is guided around with the help of an accompanying map. The tour starts at the Dublin Writers Museum on Parnell Square (beside the excellent Chapter One restaurant) and meanders through the city centre to locations featured in Dubliners.

There are two main types of material on the audiotour. For the most part it consists of abridged audio versions of the stories from the book. The voice-acting is good and the concept of walking around the locations while hearing the corresponding stories works well, although unavoidably the length of each story and the time it takes to walk the real-world setting do not always match. Just keep walking and don’t let it bother you, I’d suggest.

The headphones do a good job of insulating the listener from the noise of the 21st century city, creating a strange sensation of not really being in the modern-day city. As someone living in Dublin I found the tour interesting as an insight into the city a century ago; to see which areas are still run down (many of them) and which have changed (a few, not always for the better). Helpfully, as well as stories and directions the audio also provides ‘extras’ – comments on Dublin and Joyce.

Henrietta Street, leading up to King’s Inns on Constitution Hill, and featured in the story A Little Cloud, is one of the most changed. A once well to do area, it’s now bleak and decrepit. From there you’ll be lead down Capel Street, and along the Quays towards James Joyce Bridge and the ‘House of The Dead’, the location for the final story of Dubliners, The Dead. Wonderland have temporarily opened the building up to the public so if you’re a fan of Joyce get down there while you can and enjoy being in the location of one of Joyce’s main stories.

Back to Dubliners’ Production Details                                Read More Wonderland Reviews

QualityWaffle.ie

On sunny days in Dublin, you’d wonder why anyone would want to be anywhere else – with bustling streets, the glittering river and happy faces enjoying the fine weather but one unhappy lady is not so entrawled with the wonderfully sunny Dublin.

Sylvia emerges from a street corner and makes friends immediately with me and my fellow travellers on Wonderland Productions’ latest project Sylvia’s Quest – a story which takes you through the streets of Dublin while Sylvia – a Bulgarian archaeology student recounts her stories of her time in Dublin, battling with her difficult boss and coping with her homesickness for her family back in Bulgaria.

The streets of Dublin have never seemed so lonely to me, and being Irish with a happy group of friends and family around me in Dublin it really put the city in a different light. Sylvia battles between her love for her family and her desire to pursue her own dreams in a quest to find her way home. The trouble with Sylvia is that she must first define what home is for her – a challenge that, I can imagine, faces many emigrants.

The story is well written and Elitsa Dimova gives a warm and comfortable performance as little Syliva. The production is very much audience participation which can strike the fear of god into many theatre lovers, but if you’re willing to step beyond the theatre seats and onto the streets then you’ll be rewarded with a cleverly crafted, engaging and touching production.

Dublin Culture ✮✮✮✮✮

If you’re in Temple Bar this July or August you might spot a pretty girl in yellow leading around a group of people wearing headphones. She’s Sylvia Sylvana, the protagonist of Sylvia’s Quest, a new show by Wonderland Productions. The play is set in contemporary Dublin and uses the city as its stage. As Sylvia (played by Elitsa Dimova) guides her new friends through the streets she tells them about herself and the country she came from – the experience of the “new Irish” is one of the production’s main themes. Sylvia is a Bulgarian archaeologist who works in Dublin as a cleaner and the concept of the show is that the headphones let the audience listen to the sounds and voices which normally only Sylvia can hear. As an archaeologist far from her native land many of Sylvia’s thoughts are of Thrace, the civilisation that existed in antiquity in what’s now Bulgaria. (You know the one, it’s where Spartacus came from.) The headphones also let us listen in on the phonecalls which provide much of the play’s dialogue.

Immersive theatre – plays involving audience interaction with the characters, props or location – has been a popular part of recent theatre festivals. It’s often quite provocative. Sylvia’s Quest uses a gentler, less confrontational form of immersion. I loved it, and think other immersive theatre productions should learn from it.

By its nature immersive theatre is more subjective than traditional theatre, and that is particularly true in this case given that Sylvia’s Quest uses the streets of Temple Bar as its set. The weather, curious glances (or comments) from perplexed onlookers, and Sylvia’s conversations with the audience members guarantee that no two performances will be identical. This variation means I can’t be certain you’ll have as much fun as I did, but despite that I’m going to give Sylvia’s Quest five stars. Its use of technology and contribution to immersive theatre are commendable – but most of all Sylvia’s Quest is a lot of fun.

The Herald Dubliner

Sylvia’s Quest weaves together mythology with the story of Sylvia, a Bulgarian cleaner living in Dublin. Drawing parallels with the labyrinths of classical legend and the streets of the city, Sylvia’s difficult situation as an immigrant is explored. Making use of radio technology, through earphones we can hear her voice as she tells her story. We can also hear the voices of her family, her employers, the gods and the monsters that seem to roam through her head. Memories which are haunting her are open to us, dark events from the past, those times when she was called “pigeon girl”.

The ambition of writer, director and producer Alice Coghlan’s piece is admirable in combining location with narrative…Bulgarian actress Elitsa Dimova deserves a medal for her performance as the titular character. Her charm keeps the piece going, her craft in weaving a character that is at once sweet but also dark and potentially dangerous is impressive. A torrential downpour that would have stopped play at Wimbledon only gave one scene an added frisson of emotion as Elitsa battled through the dialogue, soaked to the skin.

The appearance of a rainbow at another key moment in the performance demonstrated the magic of what can happen when you move outside a traditional performance space.

Irish Theatre Magazine

Wonderland’s latest offering continues in their tradition of ambitious and imaginative work. Sylvia’s Quest is the site-specific journey of Sylvia Sylvana, a young Bulgarian woman recently arrived in Ireland and working as a cleaner for the Mulhalls. Sylvia’s doubly redolent name, with its woodland and magical associations, is also linked to the name of her home place, and her memories are imbued with a vivid sense of its history. She had worked as an amateur archaeologist assisting her uncle, and her narrative reminds us of the past glories of this part of the world so little known and understood by Western Europeans. For this was Ancient Thrace, the home of the historical Orpheus who became an inherent part of Greek myth – a place of magnificent golden artefacts, intact labyrinths to rival those of Crete, and of Pagane, an oracle whose mountain-top site remains intact. But Sylvia lives in the contemporary world of mobile phones, street drugs and racial slurs. The precarious state of the publishing industry is used by her comfortably middle-class employer as an excuse to cheat Sylvia of her wages.

Through the labyrinth of Dublin’s Temple Bar Elitsa Dimova as Sylvia leads audience participants who follow dialogue by means of radio transmission as she speaks with her uncle and “Baba” (or grandmother) at home; an aggressive homeless woman whom she encountered early on in Dublin; a compassionate restaurant owner; and the various members of the Mulhall clan, living and dead. Sylvia also communes with Pagane and favours the colour yellow in every aspect of her life, as it is the choice of the Thracian gods (or so we are led to believe).

The symbology of the drama is, therefore, complex, and overburdened at times. Writer Alice Coghlan has an impressive history of inventive, site-specific shows, many of them adaptations of classics. She is also experienced in other arts and media including opera, television and children’s theatre. Sylvia’s Quest emerges from her personal experience of Bulgaria and, in an effort to explain the country to Irish audiences, she has engaged in a worthy and intriguing project which includes a programme chock-a-block with historic, mythic, and socio-cultural detail about Bulgaria, supplemented by interviews with several recent emigrants to Ireland… Dimova, a diminutive actor, delivers a graceful performance requiring a variety of skills, vocal and physical. She interacts with members of the audience – always a potential minefield for either party – with both charm and confidence. The audio performers sketch hauntingly vivid personalities, especially Anne Marie O’Donovan as Homeless Hazel. Sound designer Tommy Foster meets and surpasses the challenge of providing such subtle audio variation, continuity and clarity which is sustained through fluctuating outdoor conditions. Costuming by Maria Tapper, using bright yellow and red throughout, conveys a folkloric element, while jewellery design by Paula Boyle carries through the spiral motif of the labyrinth, and suggests a Celtic link.

It is worth noting that the logistics of site-specific performance are challenging. That challenge was being met by Wonderland having the author and two others from the production team accompany the audience and actor throughout the entire journey – but the risk to an actor or member of the audience, or the threat of a sabotaged performance on the streets of Dublin, is not negligible. On the other hand, here’s to the people of Dublin and the visitors to the city, who stopped, smiled, stood aside and showed interest and encouragement when exposed to an unlooked-for event which did, and should, show the city arts scene to advantage.

The Irish Times

She materialises from out of nowhere, a tiny, tripping figure in a yellow Mackintosh, and her voice slowly emerges from a cacophony of others. This is Sylvia, played by the elfin yet commanding Elitsa Dimova. A Bulgarian living in Dublin, Sylvia divides her time between archaeological studies and poorly-paid cleaning work, and divides herself between memories, mythic fantasies and intruding voices.

With a distinctly tangled identity, Sylvia makes an unreliable guide for Wonderland Productions’ new performance, which is part play, part audio tour. Sylvia’s speech comes to us through headphones, sometimes embedded in a chorus of other characters within Tommy Foster’s intricate sound design, and she leads us with a flighty pace through Temple Bar. Her quest is elemental and age-old – the search for home – but the way is unclear.

Nudged along by voices both real and imaginary (a “prophetess”, her Dublin employers, family calls from home) Sylvia leads us through a labyrinth, which writer/director Alice Coughlan turns into a psychological and physical maze. It’s a considered approach, but it’s easy to become disoriented by its turns, and finally confused.

Three layers of narrative are warped and woven together: a socially-conscious tale of an economic migrant in recessionary Ireland, a mistily suggested pattern of mental illness, and heavier allusions to Ancient Thrace and Greek mythology, particularly the story of Orpheus. At times, Coghlan hints at schizophrenic delusion, in which even the audience members (often addressed by name) could be Sylvia’s hallucinations.

Negotiating between realism and metaphor, Dimova can indicate an underworld of despair, but plays much of it as a lighter fantasy. Some elaborations are vivid with detail: the exploitative manoeuvres of Sylvia’s desperate employer, her easily shared rye bread and casual prejudices, or the worries of her distant grandmother. Others, though, such as an inconsequential character named Deadlaus or knotted yellow motifs, feel more like noise.

At such moments, the promenade form seems less essential; the places we visit rarely correspond with Sylvia’s journey or assert their own character. There’s much to consider in the accumulation of its material, the dauntless command of Dimova, and the deep immersion into Sylvia’s headspace.

The Sunday Times

Sylvia came to Ireland to save money. She wanted to buy her grandmother a yellow house in Bulgaria and complete her PhD. In Dublin she works as a cleaner and people refer to her as “Bulgaria”, the “Polish polisher” or worst, “Invisible”. In a bid to make friends, Sylvia takes a theatre loving audience on a tour of her Dublin fortified by the ghosts of the past and the present. Fortified by a positive attitude, Sylvia prances along the streets and passionately explains the mythical history of her homeland.

Dimova’s charm is central to the production, which has been written and directed by Wonderland’s Alice Coghlan. The audience wear headsets that provide voices of additional characters, and the tour is well-timed as it has to contend with the unpredictable foot traffic of Dublin City Centre. While the subject matter is about four years out of date, the portrayal of homesickness and isolation is remarkably arresting, not to mention the incidental highlighting of a dominant country’s ignorance. I went home to read more about Bulgaria.

DublinTown.ie

Gathered with fellow participants by the Arnotts Shoppers, we were excitedly awaiting a tiny figure in yellow. Suddenly, we heard voices in our headphones. Then we saw Sylvia rushing towards us, chased by whispers, oracles, music and ghosts of her pasts…. And a new adventure began.

Set in the beautiful surroundings of Temple Bar, Sylvia’s Quest is a unique experience mixing theatre with interactive audio-walks. Led through alleys and streets, viewers get drawn into the labyrinth of Sylvia’s dreams, nightmares and hopes that seem to populate every corner of the Cultural District. The show removes the barrier between stage and people and make audience enter the character’s realm. The whole pallet of emotions floats through our hearts when watching her talk to relatives, dance with Mr Brooke Mulhall or fight for self-reliance. Her sunny coat represents our own light we carry to the unknown. Just like a torch, it brightens up the journey through the urban maze and helps us find the way out of the labyrinth.

Sylvia’s Quest is a brilliantly performed play. It will urge you to look again at the world you know through an immigrant’s eyes and face their fears and aspirations that some of us take for granted.

Leinster Leader

This week, you may see a young brunette, dressed in a bright yellow rain jacket and tomato red tights, prancing through the streets of Newbridge. You could come across her twirling a tea-cup on the Liffey bridge, polishing the window of the empty “Celebrations” shop on Main Street, looking longingly into O’Rourke’s bar or lighting candles and listening to rocks down by the Strand.

She will be followed by a flock of initially sheepish people, wearing radio headsets. These enable the audience to hear sounds, background music and the “other half” of conversations between the girl, Bulgarian actress Elitsa Dimova, and characters including her ailing grandmother back home and her selfish employer.

Sylvia’s Quest is a piece of street theatre by Wonderland Productions, written by Alice Coghlan, which has come to the Riverbank as part of Newbridge 200 Festival. First performed on the streets of Temple Bar, it has been seamlessly adapted to take in Newbridge’s lanes and roadways around Eyre Street, College Park and the Liffey.

Sylvia is an illegal immigrant to Ireland. A young archaeologist who dreams of landing a place on a historic dig, she works as a cleaner for the exploitative Yvette Mulhall and as a companion to the latter’s frail mother, who depends on her kindness and stories as her own family have failed her.

Sylvia’s Quest reveals the layers of the immigrant experience to Ireland of those from Eastern European countries. The heroine is a bright and educated girl who worked on historic excavations with her uncle back in Bulgaria. Yet in Ireland she works as a cleaner for a family who don’t pay – their thoughtlessness leaving her hungry and unable to afford to ring home.

She wants to find her place in the world, unsure of whether it is in Ireland or at home, or in some realm influenced by the myths and legends if the ancient Thracians of the Bulgarian region and the journey of Orpheus.

The crowd is “led in” to Sylvia’s story – initially a little bemused by both the jumbling of myth and Sylvia’s reality. There is also the initial self-consciousness of walking the streets of the town wearing headphones and a radio pack, following a girl who seems to be talking and dancing to herself as much as her audience most of the time.

It is a tribute to Dimova’s skill as an actress that she draws in the mobile audience – and a few curious passers-by – so by the time her journey comes to a close they are spellbound enough to hold hands with other strangers in a circle and help perform a rite to send her on her way.

For all its simplicity, this is a highly-skilled production, seamlessly marrying Dimova’s conversations with the sounds of her life and her country’s myths, heard via headphones.

The reactions of passers-by were curious. As the production debuted under sunny skies last Saturday, some people looked on curiously. Yet others didn’t seem to notice the theatre production taking place on Newbridge’s streets, ploughing through the “stage” pushing buggies or with ears clamped to mobile phones.

Just goes to show that there are secret stories happening all around, if you just look up.

The Public Reviews

Wonderland’s production, Sylvia’s Quest, takes you outside the theatre, using the Dundrum Shopping Centre, inside and out, as the set for their tale of a Bulgarian woman living in Ireland.

What transpires in this piece of street theatre, is the unfolding of the life and character of Sylvia, told through her own experiences, and the voices of people she encounters, as well as those she has left at home. At times uplifting, at times dark, it is a production that brings you face to face, literally, with a displaced woman, lost in an unfamiliar world that is harsh towards her.

Sylvia, played with charm and feeling by Elitsa Dimova, is the only actress we see, and she engages with the audience extremely well. The dancing sequence is really wonderfully portrayed, as are her facial expressions, which we get to see clearly, being so close. The other actors, played by Damien Devaney and Anne Marie O’Donovan, are voices, which Dimova conjures up by acting to them.

Before the performance, we are given headsets and receivers, through which the vocal action takes place, in a way removing the real world sounds and bringing us into this new world. Sylvia herself appears through the real crowd of the shopping centre, people going about their everyday business; some noticing us and some not, which, in some ways, is really the point of the piece. It feels like theatre, but has that reality of movies, and you can pick your own angle (although you are guided to the best vantage points if necessary). Obviously, a piece like this has no intermission, but being on the move makes one unnecessary. Also, for the outside, umbrellas are provided in the case of rain.

It is an experience that wraps all around you, and for that reason is well worth seeing. In fact, the idea has many possibilities for many tales in many locations. It is experimental, and it is very different. It takes familiar surroundings and changes them in some way, and that is unique as well. It will be interesting to see what this company and writer do next, but one thing is for sure, they are thinking outside the box.

Michael Moffat, Mail on Sunday on Sylvia’s Quest and Dubliners

I think of them as the Lone Rangers of the theatre world – a small number of individuals, determined to spread the range and accessibility of theatre in unconventional settings despite the poorly-paid effort that goes into it.

Two years after Abbey actor Karl Sheils had to close his TheatreUpstairs. He’s all set to open up again, on July 4, round the corner from the Abbey, over Lanigan’s pub on Eden Quay, with a new play by Jimmy Murphy. “We’re situated” says Karl, “between The Samaritans and The Comedy Lounge, so if you’re depressed or get fed up laughing, you can come in to us.” The new venue is more attractive, with a Green Room gallery for art exhibitions.

A little further down the Liffey, starting near the Ha’penny Bridge, the tirelessly inventive site-specific specialist Alice Coghlan and her Wonderland Company, will soon be launching her latest venture, Sylvia’s Quest, using highly innovative audience radio technology. Meanwhile, her walk-round production using dramatised recordings of Joyce’s Dubliners is still going strong.

And over by the seafront in Clontarf, a few miles past Fairview, Laura Dowdall has been successfully presenting shows during the past year in her newly set-up Viking Theatre, above Connolly’s pub, The Sheds. The different approach to publicity reflects the nature of the two small theatres. “I’ve just sent notification out to 2241 people by pressing a button” says Karl, “and I’m already looking at two hundred and something-odd replies.” The Viking had no previous fan base, so Laura Dowdall and her fellow-enthusiast, Andy Murray, had to rely on older methods. “We got 10,000 fliers printed with our programme on it. Getting the programme together was a bit of a wing and a prayer, and we just walked round Clontarf and environs and put them in all the doors.”

Laura says they’re paying the bills at present, which fortunately are not great, and the pub is happy with the business they’re bringing in. “We didn’t have much at the beginning, and we borrowed a lot of things that are still on loan. The New Theatre has given us some of their old seats. People have been great at things like that.” There’s an excellent website and video, (viking theatre@the sheds) but Laura tells me they’ve improved the layout a lot since it was made. Karl had no Arts handouts either. “We ran a fundraiser recently with 14 different acts. The money will go into the productions, and we got some donations.” Depending on the show, they can seat an audience of 50-70. It’s roughly the same at the Viking.

During the past five years, the young director Alice Coghlan’s Wonderland group have done a remarkable number of high quality shoe-string productions. She has used Georgian houses and restaurants to present performances of her translations of French and Italian comedy, Italian opera and dramatisations of Dorian Gray and Gulliver’s Travels. In her upcoming show Sylvia’s Quest, the character Sylvia will speak to and interact with her audience of 18 using a radio microphone. The audience gets two signals – Sylvia’s voice and a fully recorded radio play with interactions.

So what do these small productions and places have to offer? For Karl it’s simple: “Opportunity. For new writers, new actors, new directors.” And for the audience? “They’ll see work they’d possibly never see. You could see the next Jimmy Murphy or the next Tom Murphy.”

Laura Dowdall after years of producing had had enough of forking out “seven or eight grand a week” to hire some theatre in town. And the audience? “They aren’t the typical audience that go into town with their arms folded and say ‘go on, please me’. We’ve had people in their 40s and 50s come to us saying they’d never been to a play before. And we’ve done a few late afternoons for the active retired people, who don’t like to come out at night-time.”

Alice Coghlan says Wonderland was actually on the point of near bankruptcy before they got the great news about a grant, their first, from The Arts Council and The City Council, for Sylvia. And why does she put herself through all the hassle? “It’s just that you have ideas, and you dream so much of making these ideas reality, that anything is worth making it happen.”

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